1. Field
This disclosure relates to providing documentation customized to the installed configuration of a customer's software product.
2. General Background
Documentation for software products is generally not updated after a major release. For example, a user manual is usually created and released with the initial release of the software product, but not updated with each subsequent fix or software release/update. New releases introduce new features and architectural changes that are often incomplete. Further, the documentation is often incorrect and incomplete. Accordingly, programmers tend to focus on resolving defects in the code rather than revising the corresponding product manual. Even in the case where manuals are updated to accommodate changes or note a common problem and work around, the work around may no longer be relevant in a version where the problem has been corrected.
Customers are often left to rely upon a customer support team's knowledge of known defects and/or fixes, which may or may not be documented. Customer support attempts to solve these problems outside of the product reference documentation stream by creating documents such as technotes, white papers, and/or training materials. However, these documents are also not maintained as product changes are made, and are often lost as the product nears the end of its life.
The customer and vendor can be left in a very costly fix cycle when something goes wrong late in the implementation life. Both vendors and customers experience attrition and incur losses when having to train new personnel. It may take a long time for new personnel to learn old tips and tricks that former experts once held.
Support documents may be available to the customer on a website, or through a help application. However, multiple sources provide similar topic documentation, such as incident reports, duplicate defect reports, technotes, training materials, web and online help. When a customer has a question or problem, a correct answer requires either navigation through webpages, technotes, white papers, or released documentation, or reporting of the problem to customer support. Customers may not be running the current release of the software product and the search may require very specific version and configuration information for resolution.
Additional problems are caused by lack of a single up to date source of documentation. For example, multiple customers report the same defect because documentation is incomplete. Multiple information sources create stale and wrong information, which lead to confusion.